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WATCH: Whoopi Goldberg Calls Pence A Nazi About Gays

Last Thursday, waxing eloquent on that bastion of intellectual firepower, “The View,” Whoopi Goldberg lauded gay Olympic skater Adam Rippon’s reported turndown of an invitation to meet with Vice President Mike Pence by comparing Pence to a Nazi.

Goldberg introduced the subject by repeating a spurious charge hurled by the Left that Pence approved of gay conversion therapy, asserting, "A past controversy of his is coming back to bite him right square on the face because openly gay Olympic skater Adam Rippon reportedly declined an invite to sit with the VP because Pence says he funded gay conversion therapy in the past which Pence says is not true." She continued, "But should they have a sit-down -- should he sit down to talk with this gentleman who doesn't even sort of recognize him as a person?" After intellectual giant Joy Behar joked about gay conversion therapy, Goldberg cited Pence’s positions on gay marriage through the years, concluding, "I think it would be like asking a Jewish person to sit down and understand where the Nazi is coming from. I think that would be a difficult thing."

As Jamie Kirchick, who is gay himself, noted in Tablet magazine, Goldberg’s odious comparison does not comport with the facts. Kirchick wrote:

To start, the evangelical Christian Mike Pence does not insist that gay-owned shops be boycotted. (Actually, it’s gay activists advocating that some evangelical Christian-owned shops be boycotted, but leave that inconvenient fact aside for the moment). Mike Pence does not allege that a worldwide conspiracy of homosexuals is bent on destroying humanity. He also does not refer to gay people as “vermin.” Nor, most significantly as far as this particular analogy is concerned, does Mike Pence believe that the United States government should track down every single last gay man, woman and child on earth, crowd them into ghettoes, herd them onto cattle cars, ship them off to concentration camps, force them to subsist on starvation rations, and gas them in a process of industrial-scale extermination the likes of which the world has never seen since, well, that thing called the Holocaust.

It is based upon a single sentence from Pence’s 2000 congressional campaign website stating that federal funds targeting HIV/AIDS prevention “should be directed toward those institutions which provide assistance to those seeking to change their sexual behavior.” One would have to be particularly uncharitable to assume Pence was advocating government funds be allocated to the fruitless and harmful effort of trying to make gay people straight; this language about altering “sexual behavior” more likely meant encouraging the use of condoms and safe-sex practices more generally.

Kirchick also took The New York Times to school for its manipulative use of language to color Pence’s statement:

Regardless, there exists no evidence whatsoever of Pence ever actually saying anything in support of conversion therapy, much less “funding” it. Yet that did not stop the New York Times, in its summary of the controversy, from committing the basic journalistic sin of using the passive voice to insinuate factuality where none is warranted, stating that the language on Pence’s old campaign website was “widely interpreted as signaling his support for conversion therapy.”